Monday, November 04, 2013

Bud Norman sees evidence that the Left is somewhat less sure that Obama is the Messiah that will lead us into the promised land.

Liberalism in general doesn’t seem to be much to fun these days. The increasingly evident problems with Obamacare are the most depressing, given that it was supposed to the greatest achievement of the greatest president of all time, but none of the rest seems to be working as planned. When the pork-laden and deficit-swelling “stimulus” bill objectively failed to make good on any of its promises the true believers could argue that at least it kept the economy from sliding into depression and the earth from sliding out of its orbit and into the sun. but four years and seven trillion dollars of debt and millions of discouraged workers later the president’s economic record requires even more inventive defenses. Scandals ranging from Fast and Furious to the Pigford settlement to Solyndra to the president’s extravagantly expensive lifestyle to the Internal Revenue Service’s assaults on free speech and the right to petition for grievances can be easily ignored, given the media’s eager complicity, but it still makes a holier-than-Bush attitude harder to maintain. Increased drone strikes and pointless Afghanistan troop surges and a national security snooping apparatus that exceeds the wildest dreams of crazed Dick Cheney also make the Obama administration’s foreign policy hard to defend the earnest Bush-hater, and the “lead from behind” maneuvers that have handed the Middle East over to Vladimir Putin’s Russia and a soon-to-be-nuclear-armed Iranian theocracy make it hard to explain how a more Nobel Peace-prize winning appeasement strategy would have fared any better.

Obama's dilemma is that he was raised - and is still - a Marxist. And while he would like America to be humbled, humiliated, and transformed into a nation of which Marxists would approve, he can't be honest about it. So he has to deny his objectives and pretend to act in ways that appear to disprove his nature. That leads to "stimulus" that doesn't stimulate with "shovel ready" jobs that aren't. Initiating Fast & Furious while denying its objective, denying knowledge of IRS assaults on his enemies, surging into Afghanistan while scheduling the defeat. Killing via drone strikes is not a war winning strategy, just as strategic bombing didn't win World War 2 by itself. It's designed to make him look tough while losing the battle. Was handing the Middle East to Putin a master stroke or stupidity? We can't read his mind, but the very fact that we are asking the question is disturbing. I'm not persuaded that the hipsters at the coffee bar disapprove of Obama's Marxist objectives in the abstract, but when reality intrudes and they see the results of their dreams in the here-and-now they don't change their minds but they begin to harbor doubts about the implementation.